Cambridge University Press 0521808693 - The Carolingian Economy - Adriaan Verhulst Excerpt More information INTRODUCTION . The title of this book needs some explanation. ‘Carolingian economy’ has to be understood here as ‘the economy of the Carolingian empire’. The ‘economy of the Carolingian period’ would be too broad, not being limited to the empire within its borders under Charlemagne, which is the point of view adopted here. Countries and regions outside the empire, such as England, Scandinavia, the Islamic em- pire (including the bigger part of Spain), the Byzantine empire and eastern Europe, will be considered only in so far as their commercial relations with the Carolingian empire are at stake. The chronologi- cal terms, from the middle of the eighth century to the end of the ninth, are necessarily political, but they coincide by chance with the beginning and the end of an economic period, as will be demon- strated in Chapter 10. ‘Carolingian economy’ can also be understood as an economy directed by the Carolingian rulers. I do not reject this interpretation altogether, but it will be elucidated in Chapter 9 on ‘The economy and the state’. ‘Economy’ is used in its singular form although the Carolingian empire was not an economically homoge- neous area. Several regional ‘economies’ can be defined, each having different characteristics regarding population, the use of money, the presence of towns, the intensity of trade, etc. The territories between the Loire and the Rhine, between the Rhine and the frontier of the empire on the Elbe river and northern Italy are the most striking ex- amples. Nevertheless an inquiry into the specificity of the Carolin- gian economy as a whole, compared with regions outside the empire or to economic situations before and after the Carolingian period, © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521808693 - The Carolingian Economy - Adriaan Verhulst Excerpt More information 2 Introduction makes sense and is possible. Was it, to quote Chris Wickham,1 ‘a network of subsistence-based exchange’, where consumption com- manded production, or was it an economy producing surpluses brought to the market? This alternative comes near to that of Pirenne, for whom the Carolingian economy was a closed agrarian-based economy without towns, merchants or trade. His views, most strikingly expressed in his book Mahomet et Charlemagne (completed after his death in 1935 and published, with documentary evidence by his pupil Fernand Vercauteren, in 1937),2 were essentially a reaction to ideas advanced by Alfons Dopsch in the second edition (1921–2) of his two-volume book, written between 1911 and 1913, on the economic evolution of the Carolingian period (Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit).3 In this book Dopsch had reacted against the conceptions of what he calls the old nineteenth-century school of von Inama-Sternegg and Karl Lamprecht, who had proclaimed the primacy of the manor (‘Grundherrschaft’) in Carolingian economic life. Opposing their views on an agrarian-based economy, Dopsch stressed the role of towns, money and trade. This point of view might have been ex- pected from Pirenne but he, paradoxically, just took the side of the old school, where Lamprecht, before the First World War, had been his model and closest friend. It is however not the place here to enter into the genesis of Pirenne’s Mahomet et Charlemagne,4 but rather to review the historiography since Pirenne on the economic evolution under the Carolingians. The first phase of this historiography, from the late 1930s through to the 1950s, was driven by an attack on Pirenne’s work and, in par- ticular, his thesis about the role of the Arabs. The absolute masters of the western Mediterranean since 711, they had, according to Pirenne, forced the western Christian world to retreat to the north from what until then had remained the centre of the civilised world, imposing a continental character on the Carolingian empire. In this way it put an 1 Chris Wickham, Land and Power. Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994), p. 197. 2 Henri Pirenne, Mohammed and Charlemagne, English translation (London, Unwin, 1939). Paperback edition by Barnes and Noble (New York, 1955). 3 Alfons Dopsch, Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit vornehmlich in Deutsch- land, second revised edition, 2 vols. (Weimar, 1921–2). 4 Paolo Delogu, ‘Reading Pirenne Again’ in Richard Hodges and William Bowden (eds.), The Sixth Century. Production, Distribution and Demand (Leiden, Brill, 1998), pp. 15–40. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521808693 - The Carolingian Economy - Adriaan Verhulst Excerpt More information Introduction 3 end to the circulation, mostly by Syrian merchants, from the shores of the Mediterranean to the north, of goods such as papyrus, spices, oriental wines and olive oil. Different studies re-examined the ref- erences to these products in Merovingian and Carolingian texts and concluded that their disappearance from Carolingian texts had never been so complete nor so early as Pirenne had believed or had had other causes.5 More fundamental than the discussions on documentary evidence for the presence of these goods, was the argument about the causes of the adoption by the Carolingians of the silver penny and their abandonment of gold coins, which Pirenne had also related to the Arab conquest of the western Mediterranean and to the economic regression which in his opinion had been its consequence in the west. In the late 1940s and early 1950s Maurice Lombard developed a theory about the vast quantities of gold the Arabs had acquired through conquest in Persia and Africa and which they brought into circulation. With this gold, according to Lombard, they bought slaves, wood, furs and other wares in western Europe and vivified its econ- omy.6 Sture Bolin supported these unorthodox views but through different ways, tracing trade links between the Arab lands and Scandinavia that would explain the hoards of Arab silver coins found in Scandinavia which finally reached western Europe.7 These theories did not stand firm: Grierson proved that no Arab gold coins circu- lated in western Europe in any significant quantities.8 Moreover most of the Arabic coins found in Birka (near Stockholm, Sweden) date from the end of the ninth century and the beginning of the tenth,9 although a hoard of several thousand Arabic silver coins, the latest 5 Bryce Lyon, The Origins of the Middle Ages. Pirenne’s Challenge to Gibbon (New York, 1972), pp. 70–6. 6 Maurice Lombard, ‘Les bases monetaires´ d’une suprematie´ economique.´ L’or musulman du viieauxiesiecle’,` Annales. Economies–Societ´ es–Civilisations´ 2 (1947), pp. 143–60; Maurice Lombard, ‘Mahomet et Charlemagne. Le probleme` econo-´ mique’, Annales. Economies–Societ´ es–Civilisations´ 3 (1948), pp. 188–99. 7 Sture Bolin, ‘Mohammad, Charlemagne and Ruric’, The Scandinavian Economic History Review 1 (1953), pp. 5–39. 8 Philip Grierson, ‘Carolingian Europe and the Arabs: The Myth of the Mancus’, Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 32 (1954), pp. 1059–74. 9 Bjorn¨ Ambrosiani, ‘Excavations in the Black Earth Harbour 1969–71’, in Bjorn¨ Ambrosiani and Helen Clarke (eds.), Early Investigations and Future Plans, Birka Studies 1 (Stockholm, 1992), p. 79. © Cambridge University Press www.cambridge.org Cambridge University Press 0521808693 - The Carolingian Economy - Adriaan Verhulst Excerpt More information 4 Introduction dating from the mid-ninth century, was concealed at Ralswiek, on the island of Rugen,¨ off the north-German Baltic coast.10 This does not mean that there was no direct commerce between the Arab world and western Europe in Carolingian times, as Pirenne, not without admitting some exceptions, notably concerning the slave trade, con- tended. But their economic impact must not be exaggerated, even if Grierson himself and other numismatists suppose a link between the Carolingian monetary reform of the mid-eighth century and an earlier Arab reform at the end of the seventh century.11 Numismatic evidence, which in this case too is scanty, does not indeed, in the opinion of K. F.Morrison, tell anything certain about trade routes or about the volume of trade.12 On the basis of documentary evidence however, F.-L. Ganshof, himself a disciple of Pirenne, demonstrated the year after Mahomet et Charlemagne had appeared, that in the eighth century the relations between East and West continued through the ports of Provence, particularly in Marseilles, be it on a minimal level.13 H. L. Adelson has made Byzantium responsible for this state of affairs14 and other authors also tried to prove that relations between the West and Byzantium and the East, mainly through Italian ports under theoretical Byzantine authority, like Venice and Tyrrenean ports in southern Italy, particularly Amalfi, depended in the first place on the military relations between Byzantium and the Arabs in the eastern Mediterranean. As the essential part of Pirenne’s thesis, the negative role of the Arabs, with as its consequences the absence of merchants, towns and trade in western Europe and the predominance of an agrar- ian economy based on the self-sufficiency of the big estate, has been rejected totally or partially by most of his critics, only the lat- ter element, in a second phase of the historiography of Pirenne’s critics, has been the object of new studies. That the attention shifted from trade to agriculture may be explained by the satiation caused 10 Helen Clarke and Bjorn¨ Ambrosiani, Towns in the Viking Age, second revised edition (London: Leicester University Press, 1995), p. 109. 11 Philip Grierson, ‘The Monetary Reforms of Abd-Al-Malik’, Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 3 (1960), pp. 241–64. 12 Karl F. Morrison, ‘Numismatics and Carolingian Trade: A Critique of the Evidence’, Speculum 38 (1963), p. 432. 13 Franc¸ois-L.